Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.
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There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
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It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
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There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
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But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.
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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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Live with no time-out.
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There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
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The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
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The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
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All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
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A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
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Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
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The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.
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Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
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The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.
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Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
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We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!